1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic camera and a method of reproducing its images, and in particular relates to an electronic camera capable of quickly reproducing and displaying captured images and a method of reproducing the images.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional electronic camera, for checking once captured images, it is necessary to designate reproduction and display of the images after switching from a shooting mode with which the images are captured and recorded on a recording medium to a reproduction mode with which the images recorded on the recording medium are reproduced and displayed. As the recording medium which records a large amount of image data, a magneto-optical (MO) disk, a hard disk or the like available with relatively low cost for its recording capacity is used. Such recording medium generally requires a long time to read or write information thereon.
The electronic camera has caused to its user the inconvenience of waiting for a long time until captured images are reproduced and displayed because the images once recorded on the recording medium are read and then displayed after switching to the reproduction mode. Besides, in recent years, there has been a growth in use of electronic cameras equipped with an image pickup device of large number of pixels owing to development of the image pickup device and market demand. If an image is captured with a large number of pixels, the amount of data constituting the image extremely increases; and therefore, it requires a longer time to read the image data out of the recording medium and causes the inconvenience of taking a long time for checking the captured images.
Because the number of pixels in the image pickup device has greatly increased in recent years, it takes much more time than before to process the image data outputted from the image pickup device. Particularly, in the conventional electronic camera, processes of writing or reading to or from the recording medium are slow due to the characteristics of the nonvolatile recording medium, and therefore much time is spent on the processes. For example, for recording or reading the compressed data of image data having 2 million pixels outputted from the image pickup device, it requires about 2 seconds for recording or reading. Accordingly, it is necessary to wait for 12 seconds only for temporarily recording and reading image data of 6 million pixels, and in the actual image pickup process, the time required for the automatic exposure (AE), automatic focus (AF) or image processing is added; therefore, when immediately displaying the reproduced images for checking, the user may have an impression of very bad operability.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 10-23365 discloses a digital camera which enables high-speed image data recording by providing a plurality of recording media of low recording speed to a conventional electronic camera so as to simultaneously record pieces of image data on respective recording media. This conventional method of transferring image data of the digital camera is effective in successively recording or reproducing plural images, but imposes inconvenience that the time required to execute the process of reading the image data for reproducing the image of the first page is not at all shortened.
Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 11-215455 shows an image display device which increases a browsing speed, in browsing reduced image data in an image file with a browsing display mode, by shortening the display time for browsing per each frame if image data has a large number of frames. This conventional image display device reduces the time required to successive reproduction of images by shortening the display time per one frame of image, and therefore inconvenience also occurs that the time required to execute the process of reading the image data for reproducing the image of the first page cannot be shortened.
The present invention has been developed in view of the above-described circumstances, and has as its object the provision of an electronic camera capable of reproducing and displaying images in a short time when captured images are reproduced, and a method of reproducing images of the electronic camera.
In order to attain the above-described object, the present invention is directed to an electronic camera, comprising: an image pickup device which picks up an image; an image processing device which outputs the picked up image to a recording medium and at the same time records the image in a memory capable of executing a writing process or reading process with a speed higher than that of the recording medium; and a display device which displays the image, wherein, in reproducing and displaying the image, the image recorded in the memory is read and displayed on the display device.
According to the present invention, it becomes possible to reproduce and display the image in a short time.